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UPDATE: Thanks for the comments so far. To clarify my situation:
My main use cases are: Gmail (personal): For personal contacts. Gmail (work): For professional contacts related to my role. Outlook (work): For internal and external business communication. LinkedIn: Managing professional connections. Messaging apps (WhatsApp, Messenger, etc.): Keeping in touch with a wide range of contacts.
I’ve tried syncing across these platforms using Google Contacts, vCard exports, and a few automation tools, but the results have been inconsistent. Either the syncing doesn't work as expected, or there’s a lot of manual cleanup involved—especially when contacts change roles or details across different apps.
I’m wondering if anyone has found a more seamless way to manage contacts across all these different contexts? I’d love to hear any recommendations for more advanced tools, automations, or strategies that have worked for you.
I've got this vision of a Neal Stephenson story which will never be written about a family in the 22nd century that has kept all their personal contacts in Git for over 100 years ...
21 years ago I used it with Apple’s iSync to sync contacts with my flip phone. Later with my iPhone.
I have some lists set up to sort out family, work, etc. I just looked and this can _finally_ be done on iOS as well. It was a Mac-only feature for far too long.
Inside the Apple ecosystem everything assumes use of the Contacts app, so I’ve never really had to think about using anything else. Back when AIM was a thing, I could use Address Book to add people’s screen names and they’d show up in iChat (AIM is dead, but I still have their old screen names in my Contacts app). It supports adding social profiles, URLs, and creating relationships. I can add their birthdays and they show up in the Calendar. It’s always been pretty seamless and hasn’t left me wanting. It’s been pretty nice, but I wouldn’t call myself a heavy user.
At work I don’t manage contacts. We have Outlook with Exchange and I just use the directory of everyone to send the occasional email. LinkedIn is just LinkedIn; I rarely look at it.
I exclusively use Google Contacts. I have 3 devices and Contacts adequately manages everything in the cloud. It also adequately syncs to Outlook-style contacts, but I barely use anything in the Outlook ecosystem except for email itself.
I find Google Contacts still quite deficient in a few respects:
As with Outlook, it's clearly geared towards personal use (even in the enterprise-class Workspaces) and each individual Contact is meant to represent one individual person who's optionally associated with one individual business only.
This makes trouble for many aspects. I rarely contact individuals who aren't associated with businesses. But within a business, there are usually multiple contacts needed to organize all the departments I interface with. Many do not have personal names or one person! They are, e.g. "Customer Service", or "Billing". Also, many contacts involve Robo-SMS, for security codes, or notifications, and those are paramount to be stored as Contacts, because of their sensitive nature, I want them whitelisted and identified and prioritized properly.
So sometimes I cram more than one contact into an item, with multiple phone numbers/email addresses. But I've found that the tagging doesn't work so well; usually Contacts will "forget" that I tagged them as "Custom - <some string>" and blank them out. And that's uncool.
It is not possible to make folders or containers of groups of contacts (other than tagging them). There is no inheritance or linking of data. So if I have 6 contacts from "example.com" they are all 100% independent of one another, even if they share data. So I must replicate that data and carefully update them all in unison. There's no syncing or associating them.
I don't know any elegant solution for a single app or a single format, that still probably needs to conform closely to the .VCF type exports. But there clearly need to be richer features for organizing and linking data, for ease of maintenance, because I do maintain hundreds of contacts, even active ones, and it's a burden to keep them up-to-date.
The Google integration helps a little bit; it's good when someone's profile avatar populates automatically, or it pulls in data from Maps. More of that, please!
A contact is just a bunch of fields and context. The context matters the most, as long as you have a single real way to get in touch. So as long as you have a `notees` column, permissions to `readfile`, and a shell you're golden.
Others I've tried:
* Clay (https://clay.earth) is a great option for "batteries included". Based on what you described, it can pull from Google/Outlook, Linkedin, and messaging apps. Doesn't get all the duplicates but gets close enough, and they offer carddav for 2-way sync to phone.
* Monica (http://monicahq.com) works for more barebones and self-hosted. They were working on a new version, not sure if it was ever merged into main product. I tried it once and it ended up being more of a gift and birthdays-focused notes app for me, but YMMV.
* Otherwise a Notion doc or spreadsheet might be enough! Especially if you start with an export from something else.
It’s still in development, v4 is getting only bugfixes, v5 is in beta.
Their "OfficeLife" tool banner is still on the main site as well, with an expected release of May 2022.
Development seems to be quite slow overall.
There are other “personal CRMs” around, but many starting at way more per month/year than I’m willing to budget for such a thing.
They also have great (human) support, which I find important when it comes to backbone services like email, calendar, and contacts.
I host this end-to-end encrypted on https://www.etesync.com/ .
I sync to my Android phone with the etesync app.
I use the Android contacts app to manage details.
I don't keep detailed records. Just contact details, how I know them, name of children, etc.
I personally use a paid E-Mail service (mailbox.org) and a self hosted nextcloud.
The APP myphoneexplorer can be used to sync offline.
This can be quite difficult to achieve. The moment your contact information is given to someone using Android, it will be synced up with Google (and known by most Google properties).
> I personally use a paid E-Mail service (mailbox.org)
May I know how long you’ve been using it and how the experience has been? Are you using it with a custom domain?
Disclaimer: I use this email only for friends and family, told them not to tell anybody and did not register ANY internet account with it - so no spam, no unwanted emails and no shit.
I guess it won’t tell big tech who your friends are. At least until you talk with them regularly through online channels.
- phone - this is kind of ok, because phone spam is less common
- email - to prevent spam
- birthday - this one is quite critical, because here in germany it is a common way to verify authentication on phone calls by insurance companies
- job-details, contact relationships, etc.
I doubt that these are all in the public registry.
Among all the people I interact with, the only set of contacts that I do not need to save their info is co-workers in the same company; the enterprise-wide LDAP (ActiveDirectory in this case) has everything.
My functional requirements that I have not found anything to satisfy them:
I have different devices and clients, and some contacts only make sense on one (or some) of the devices. It would be ideal if the sync process could use some group/tag and operate on a subset of all data. I have not found this anywhere and essentially gave up on this, willing to live with having all data in all places.
Another point is data shared amongst contacts: many employees of company X share the same work address; or married couple John and Jane share the same home address and the same landline phone. If I duplicate the info and this phone rings me up, which name should be displayed as caller?
In the end, I use a completely self-made setup. Data are entered via text files in a custom markup, then translated into graph data (RDF to be exact) and stored in a data store. Export to VCF (among other formats) helps with importing the data into a CardDAV server, from where all device/client sync.
I would love to find something that will allow me to abandon this setup, but nothing is there yet.
If you are contacting more than a hundred or so persons, then you are running bulk emails which is a different issue.
I don't sync anything with anything. I look up a contact and enter whatever detail I need manually wherever it's needed. I lean a lot on the frequently-used autocomplete lots of applications have, too, but that's a convenience that I don't take as authoritative.
Let’s do contacts for this discussion thread.
I’m still in the Apple ecosystem, so I let the OSes (macOS, iOS, etc.) handle that. The sync is almost seamless, or rather, this is the best of all the devils. My personal and work are intertwined; thus, it is more of a tag-ish layer of friends, acquaintances, etc. Yes, sometimes I mix the joke of friend Archetype-A with friend Archetype-B and vice versa. ;-)
Last time I checked, my Contacts had almost 5,000 entries in there and I don’t mind this part growing. I’ve tried Dex[1] for about a year+ but found it slow. Their work seems to have slowed and stalled, while you expect them to “move beyond a tool that seems to be still in beta.” This was a few years ago, and hence I’ve no idea about their current situation.
I also tried Monica,[2] but she do not know how to keep things in sync. The developer/team also seems to be focussing on an office suite that has been “Coming Soon in 2002” since 2021.[3] If you want to try out Monica and see if this fits, I suggest spinning one quickly with PikaPods[4] for less than $2 a month.
Now, I’m trying out Clay[5] for broader outreach and staying in touch with people with whom I’ve interacted or connected via the networks that I was and am part of.
For the closer and final few inner layers of my Onion of Contacts, I use a simple spreadsheet inspired by Derek Sivers[6] and Jakob Greenfeld.[7] This is where I have the people with whom I can be in touch regularly (monthly, quarterly, half-yearly, and yearly). This is not very strict, and I tend to have these as recurring tasks in my calendar, along with my usual digital chores. The spreadsheet's contact list will ideally be between 20-100 at max. These are the ones I call/write/text regularly, wish/attend birthdays, parties, remember anecdotes, their family, etc.
I use synching and vcard files.
